Born in Kenya, presaging a life of international wandering, Brian Cox was the son of a US embassy professional, ex-boxer, and tennis addict whose domination resulted in Brian learning the game of tennis early on. He lived in Yemen, Vietnam, and Colombia, and attended college in the US, continuing his interests in tennis and Eastern spirituality. For many years he worked with Dennis Adams, his spiritual advisor and surrogate father. […]
Villa asserts that SHUs restrain, control and essentially torture those inmates who demonstrate most resistance. The picture conveyed by Villa of his enforced isolation is extremely depressing, yet he mixes endearing family photographs among the essays, along with poignant recollections of his mother. Remembering his twelve-year-old self, Villa recalls his grandfather who served in World War II, his father who always believed in him, taught […]
★★★★½ 
A delightful romp through a woman’s head, the hair on it and the brain inside it, To Hair and Back is a life story told, as the author states, “one strand at a time.” In this well-conceived memoir based on Rhonda Eason’s now-overcome longing for what she saw as “perfect” hair, she demonstrates her artistic verve, cleverly aligning various stages of her life to the struggles behind the scenes with her uncooperative tresses.
African-American author Eason describes how her obsession with hair began as a girl growing up in the tough streets of Detroit. Her father was gone, and […]
★★★★½ 
Business and travel writer Shirley Melis experiences love and devotion for two amazing men in her life and suffers the loss of both in her poignant memoir Banged-Up Heart: Dancing with Love and Loss.
Honesty is the hallmark of this memoir, a paean to the best of relationships beset by the inevitability of death. Two years after the sudden loss of Joe, a fellow writer, political activist, and her husband of thirty years, Melis arranges to meet an old acquaintance and recent widower for a possible new start. She is urged on by a coterie of old friends. […]
“Even with ropes, a fall in the wrong place could be fatal.” So reads the guidebook for the trail that author/adventuress Michelle Sevigny traverses.
After confronting some painful events in her middle years, most recently the loss of her beloved dog to cancer, Sevigny seeks comfort through her longtime enjoyment of hiking. Walking the Likya Yolu, the Lycian Way, with its 500+ kilometers of winding paths on the southern coastline of Turkey, seems the ideal antidote to her nagging sense of emptiness. The trail is marked…sometimes. In other places, she needs to rely on a technology that even she found […]
Cubicle to Cuba: Desk Job to Dream Job is an engaging travel memoir about Heidi Siefkas leaving her job at an internet start-up, dropping everything, and working as a tour guide in Cuba. Siefkas gives the nuts and bolts about adapting to life in Cuba, as well as traveling to Australia, Italy, Peru, and other points around the world. As with her previous memoirs, it’s a spirited and page-turning read.
Siefkas has lived quite an interesting life – after nearly facing death after being crushed with a falling tree branch, which also saw the dissolution of her marriage, she’s always […]
Academic Betrayal: The Bullying of a Graduate Student is Loren Mayshark’s account of bad practices and mistreatment at Hunter College in New York City. Eager to get a master’s degree to become a history professor, that degree never materialized, as he became demoralized with a dysfunctional administration, ineffectual teachers, and bad policies, which are endemic to the educational system in the U.S. on the whole.
Far from seeming like Mayshark has some sort of vendetta, he lays out his case carefully and meticulously. Most agree that the student loan system, for one, has serious problems, so it does not take […]
The book was written by Peach herself along with , as she carries on journaling her path through teen events through going to college away from home, and how she deals day to day with her life and faces tasks with her mother, who she clearly has a very strong […]